Divekick

Divekick

Developer

Publisher

Release Date

Platforms

Genre

Fighting

Franchise

Divekick

“

Playing with items on is anti-competitive. Turn them off and assert your superiority over anyone who disagrees.

— Advice from Uncle Sensei

”

Divekick is a fighting game, originally created as a Kickstarter project before finding a backer in Iron Galaxy Studios, released for the Playstation 3, Playstation Vita and PC as a digital title on August 20, 2013. A parody of the fighting game genre and the FGC as a whole, the game is packed to the brim with jokes referencing popular memes and games from the genre- references to the Knicks, Fraud Detection warnings and joking encouraging of online rage-quitting abound. In Divekick, matches are settled with a single blow- as every character has health in the thousands, but attack damage in the millions- and it is designed to boil down the "fat" of a fighting game to provide every player with the experience of the last few seconds of a professional top-tier competitive match every game.

In Divekick, matches are settled in a single blow, contrary to most fighting games that require intricate combos and heavy memorization of patterns, cancels and skill-based timing. Divekick was designed to cut through all of that to recreate the "Hype Moment" from the final seconds of an FGC tournament match. However, just because matches end in a single blow, doesn't mean that the game is easy to mash through. There are only two buttons used in Divekick- the "Dive" button, causing characters to jump, and the "Kick" button, causing a mid-air character to execute their unique divekick attack. Players must strategically time and use their jumps, kicks and character specific abilities to avoid the other players strike and defeat them. Each match can track up to ten rounds, with the best of five rounds winning the match. If a player loses four matches in a row, the game delivers a "Fraud Detection Warning", and confirms the losing players status as a fraud if they lose their final match without winning a single match, though it makes reference to said player's come-back if they succeed. After the "Fraud Detection" is negated, and the player makes a come-back to the point where he wins 4 matches in a row, the game delivers a "Choke Detection Warning" to the opponent. Each match has a traditional timer as well- and if it runs out, the player closest to the center of the screen is given the victory. If both players are equal distances from the center, a giant boot comes down from the sky and kills them both.

Originally, Divekick was a joke project funded by Adam "Keits" Heart, Editor-In-Chief of the major FGC community of Shoryuken.com. After numerous extremely popular and well-received showings at various tournaments, Keits started a Kickstarter project to fund a PC release. The Kickstarter was quite successful- far exceeding the money needed to fund the game, but it was noticed by Dave Lang and his studio, Iron Galaxy Studios, who struck a deal with Keits to fund and release the game, delaying the game's release into the third quarter of 2013 to use the additional money of a professional backer to fund additional characters and overall UI improvements. Shortly thereafter, Iron Galaxy was contacted by and struck a deal with Sony to release the game on the Playstation 3 and Playstation Vita.

Divekick was released to a mixed reception on release- while many reviews enjoyed the humor and praised it for its depth and intense gameplay, with Giant Bomb referring to it several times over as the "purest form" of the genre, and the final few seconds of a competitive level fighting game distilled into any and every match regardless of skill levels.

Nevertheless, some felt that the $15.00 price point was too much for what many dismissed as a joke, especially a niche joke where much of the humor flew over a lot of the presses' head. Many also complained that the more "advanced" characters like S-Kill, Stream and Baz were too hard to use, and too complex and that they spoiled the purity of the game.

Its GameRankings score stands at 80% for the PC, 68% for the Playstation 3 and 70% for the Playstation Vita. Metacritic ratings stand at 65/100 for the Playstation 3 and 70/100 for the Vita.